Sue Wootton
Shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2018 Ockham NZ Book Awards
The book
The Yield is the vivid and lyrical new collection from award-winning poet Sue Wootton. These poems are sensorially alive, deeply attentive to language, the body, and the world around us.
Down in the bone the word-strands glimmer and ascend
often disordered, often in dreams,
bone-knowledge beating a path through the body to the throat
labouring to enter the alphabet.
– 'Lingua Incognita'
Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energising power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love.
This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; about sowing, tending and reaping.
Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest.
The author
Sue Wootton has published five volumes of poetry and has received several awards, including the 2015 Caselburg Trust International Poetry Prize and second place in the 2013 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. She won the 2011 NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition and has twice won the Takahē Poetry Competition. Her first novel, Strip (Makaro Press, 2016), was longlisted for the fiction prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards. A former physiotherapist, Sue lives in Dunedin where she is the selecting editor for the Otago Daily Times Weekend Poem column, and co-editor of the Medical Humanities blog Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life.
Author website suewootton.com
Book website https://suewootton.nz/book/the-yield/
Reviews
'Dunedin poet Sue Wootton's fifth collection is a richly mulled book about suffering and empowerment'
Siobhan Harvey, New Zealand Herald Weekend magazine Christmas Books, 2 December 2017
'Intelligent, well crafted and involving poems on nature, time and a nagging spiritual sense'
New Zealand Listener top books of 2017, 25 November 2017
'Dunedin poet Sue Wootton's fifth volume, The Yield is a beautiful, wonderfully produced book. Significantly, it contains a heap of award-winning poems ("Calling'', "Ice Diver'' and "Luthier''), yet for a book crammed full of dazzling ideas, a touch of madness and the odd slice of cheese, it retains a sense of space.'
Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times, 27 March 2017
'Sue Wootton's latest collection of poetry is a sumptuous read, a read that sparks in new directions while clearly in debt to everything she has written to date.'
Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf
'To me, the challenge and deep delight of poetry has always been in how much you can say with how little. I like denseness. I want one crucial word that does the work of ten. Wootton has shown herself to be a master in this regard. There is not a single word in this book that does not need to be there.'
Sarah Lin Wilson The Reader
'The Yield is one of the most satisfying, intelligent, well-crafted and involving volumes of New Zealand poetry I have read in the last decade. This is a poet who really knows her craft, has a wonderful sense of form, and isn't afraid to front up to big questions without getting sententious about it.'
Nicholas Reid Reid's Reader
Publication Details
Paperback, 235 x 160 mm, 84 pp, ISBN 978-0-947522-48-3, $25
Published 2017